Effects on Natural-Convection Heat Transfer of a Partial Partition in a Cubic Enclosure

Experiment and computation have been conducted in this work to investigate the effects of a partial partition on the natural- convection heat transfer in a cubic enclosure. The enclosure is similar to one that houses electronic equipment; and the partial partition whose orientation with respect to the horizontal can vary is attached to a vertical wall of the enclosure. Such partial partition could in reality be used to shield a region of the enclosure from excessive heat, or represent an object that is different to the housed equipment. The enclosure’s floor has parallel bands that are heated to a constant, high temperature, to mimic rows of heated equipment; and the bands are separated by gaps that are kept at a lower temperature that is also constant. The enclosure’s ceiling has a constant temperature which is lowest. All vertical walls of the enclosure and the partial partition are assumed to be adiabatic. Rayleigh number is fixed in this work. The software package Fluent-ANSYS15 has been used for a 2-D computation; and the standard k-epsilon turbulence model has been employed. Depending on its orientation, the partial partition has been found to alter significantly the flow field which in turn affects the heat transfer from the hot bands on the floor. Also, fairly good agreement has been obtained between experimental measurements and computational results.